Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an all-too-common yet often misunderstood mental health condition that can arise in response to a traumatic event. This can include a range of things like natural disasters, military combat, car accidents, violent assaults, and more. For those with PTSD, memories of the traumatic event are the main component that can overwhelm and intrude on the individual, causing intense feelings of fear, depression, anxiety, isolation, and helplessness to arise.
These memories can also trigger a range of physical and emotional symptoms, such as flashbacks, nightmares, difficulty sleeping, and difficulty concentrating, emotional and physical exhaustion, essentially making it difficult for someone to feel safe and live a normal life.
Seeking help/treatment for PTSD is important for someone struggling so that they can learn to cope with the effects, and reduce the amount of distress they experience, leading to a better quality of life. New research is emerging that is giving insight into just how impactful memories are in relation to PTSD and how different forms of treatment–or alleviation–of the negative symptoms, could be possible.
In the article “Reactivating hippocampal-mediated memories during reconsolidation to disrupt fear” Stephanie Grella et. al. examine how combining viral neuronal tagging with optogenetics allows them to influence the hippocampal ensemble so that they can interrupt the conveyance of fear memory specifically with mice. From this study, it was shown that by reactivating a happy memory in the conditioning context, the fear memory of the mice could be changed during recall. The more positive the experience was, the more likely it was to weaken the fear memory. To further back this up, it was found from the study that reactivating a negative or neutral experience was not enough to reduce fear. Overall, the approach of activating a positive memory to counteract fear memories helps researchers search to find new treatments that could help reduce the strength of bad memories associated with PTSD symptoms.
In the article “Odor-induced recall of emotional memories in PTSD–Review and new paradigm for research”, Judith Daniels et.al. discuss how the intrusive relieving symptoms that come with PTSD can be categorized as a classical fear condition. With this in mind, they also describe how olfactory memory is able to shed light on emotional mechanisms along with mental disorders like PTSD that deal with pathological emotional processing. Simply put, they looked at how odors have a connection to traumatic memories, along with essentially aiding signals for trauma-related danger. Furthermore, they go on to discuss how smell itself can evoke a conditioned response from regions like the amygdala and orbitofrontal in the brain that deals with limbic and neocortical areas.
Taking both studies into account, it is fascinating to explore how memories are a fundamental factor in determining the severity of PTSD symptoms. A greater comprehension of how memories influence mental health conditions, such as PTSD, equips people with the capacity to identify other brain regions and pathways, such as olfaction, that are related to memories. This knowledge can be used to develop treatments, such as the use of particular scents to evoke positive memories that can counter the effects of negative memories. Overall, it is clear that understanding how memories contribute to PTSD can help inform treatments and approaches to reducing the severity of symptoms, ultimately leading to improved mental health.
References
Daniels, & Vermetten, E. (2016). Odor-induced recall of emotional memories in PTSD–Review and new paradigm for research. Experimental Neurology, 284(Pt B), 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.expneurol.2016.08.001
Zaki, Yosif, et al. “Hippocampus and Amygdala Fear Memory Engrams Re-Emerge after Contextual Fear Relapse.” Neuropsychopharmacology (New York, N.Y.), vol. 47, no. 11, 2022, pp. 1992–2001, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-022-01407-0.
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